Le Pen and the Super-State

Marine Le Pen’s strong showing in the French election, in which she achieved a rough tie for first, makes her eligible for the final round, on May 7. At that point, she will lose, because all the other parties will unite against her.

That’s all right with me. Most of her program is the European equivalent of Bernie Sanders, plus anti-immigration. But she has fired a warning shot across the bows of the European establishment, and that is an important service, more important than libertarians are willing to admit when they are thinking ideologically instead of historically.

The European Union, or at least the European Common Market, was, in a way, a libertarian invention — a vast free trade zone offering an end to the internal warfare that had wrecked Europe on two occasions during the 20th century. But because pan-European institutions have been constructed in an era in which modern liberal ideas and social practices predominate among intellectuals and bureaucrats, the mechanisms of European solidarity became steadily more . . . solid. Bureaucrats in Brussels and their clones throughout the continent began to rule by directive, just like the tsars, and to encroach on every area of life. Europe was on its way to becoming a centralized state, a dictatorship of the bureaucratariat. In a society in which everything is registered, regulated, subsidized, or repressed, and all inconvenient facts are concealed from public view, it’s free trade for crony capitalists, jobs-for-life for entitled workers, permanent unemployment for everyone else, an economic growth rate descending to zero, and whatever civil liberties the nanny state allows you to have.

Le Pen has fired a warning shot across the bows of the European establishment, and that is an important service.

That was bad enough, but for ideological as well as economic reasons, the Eurocrats also brought in millions of migrants, not caring whether the newcomers embraced the values of local populations — because the Eurocrats’ project was to homogenize local populations.

Like things that come out of a copy machine, ideologies degenerate when subjected to generations of reproduction, so I suppose it’s not surprising, although it is shocking, that the European globalists didn’t see any difficulty in the fact that the people they were importing and subsidizing were often violently opposed to modern liberal — or any liberal — ideas. They saw opposition to immigration as a plot to bring back competitive European states — and so it became, as the populations of one state after another turned away from Brussels and toward some image of their own historic cultures. The prominence of Le Pen is a feature of this rebellion, and it is remarkable that in nation after nation, the current competition is between the national culture and Brussels, not among the various nationalisms of Britons, French, Germans, and so forth.

That kind of competition may come, but at present the important thing to recognize is that however uneasy libertarians may feel about the irrationality and sometimes tyranny of local cultures, it’s bad news when they are extinguished by a super-state. Europe’s original growth toward a general culture of personal autonomy and competitive capitalism was greatly encouraged by the fact that creative people could easily move from one local culture to another. This is the secret of the “Protestant” spirit of capitalism — in a religiously divided continent, Protestants and Catholics could see competitive models of society close at hand, and adopt or reject them. (Two interesting discussions of this matter: Hugh Trevor Roper, The European Witch Craze . . . and Other Essays; Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich.)

In nation after nation, the current competition is between the national culture and Brussels, not among the various nationalisms of Britons, French, Germans, and so forth.

But the idea that individuals should be free to act on their own is as foreign to the Eurocrats as the idea that national cultures should remain distinctive. At what might be the last moment to resist homogenization-by-bureaucratic-edict, Le Pen and the Brexiters and all the rest of them have arisen and are making their impact. They’re on a rescue mission — the rescue of real diversity.

Now, you don’t have to like the EMT guys, but you may be happy that they finally showed up. And if you don’t want them to keep showing up, don’t keep setting your house on fire.